Conky is a system monitor software for the X Window System. It is available for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. It is free software released under the terms of the GPL license. Conky is able to monitor many system variables including CPU, memory, swap, disk space, temperature, top, upload, download, system messages, and much more. It is extremely configurable, however, the configuration can be a little hard to understand. Conky is a fork of torsmo.

The pause=5 parameter delays conky's drawing for 5 seconds at startup to make sure that the desktop had time to load and is up.

Trouble Shooting

These are known issues people have with conky and their solutions.

Conky starts and doesn't display anything on the screen

First check for syntax errors in your configuration file's text variable. Then double check that your user has permission to run every command inside your configuration file and that all needed packages are installed.

Transparency

Conky supports two different types of transparency. Pseudo-transparency and real transparency that requires a composite manager to be installed and running. If you enable real transparency and don't have a composite manager running your conky will not be alpha transparent with transparency enabled for fonts and images as well as the background.

Pseudo-transparency

Pseudo-transparency is enabled by default in conky. Pseudo-transparency works by copying the background image from the root window and using the relevant section as the background for conky. Some window managers set the background wallpaper to a level above the root window which can cause conky to have a grey background. To fix this issue you need to set it manually with feh.

In ~/.xinitrc:

sleep 1 && feh --bg-center ~/background.png &

Enable real transparency

To enable real transparency, you must have a composite manager running and the following lines added to .conkyrc inside the conky.config array:

Do not minimize on Show Desktop

Using Compiz: If the 'Show Desktop' button or key-binding minimizes Conky along with all other windows, start the Compiz configuration settings manager, go to "General Options" and uncheck the "Hide Skip Taskbar Windows" option.

If you do not use Compiz, try editing conky.conf and adding/changing the following line:

own_window_type = 'override',

or

own_window_type = 'desktop',

Refer to conkys man page for the exact differences. But the latter option enables you to snap windows to conkys border using resize key-binds in e.g. Openbox, which the first one does not.

Integrate with GNOME Shell

Fix scrolling with UTF-8 multibyte characters

The current version of conky (1.9.0) suffers from a bug where scrolling text increments by byte, not by character, resulting in text containing multibyte characters to disappear and reappear while scrolling. A package with a patch fixing this bug can be found in the AUR: conky-utfscrollAUR

Prevent flickering

This article or section needs expansion.

Reason: Explain the steps to follow if there is no dbe module, probably in xorg rather than here with a link (Discuss in Talk:Conky#)

Conky needs Double Buffer Extension (DBE) support from the X server to prevent flickering because it cannot update the window fast enough without it. It can be enabled with Xorg in /etc/X11/xorg.conf with Load "dbe" line in "Module" section. The xorg.conf file has been replaced (1.8.x patch upwards) by /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d which contains the particular configuration files. DBE is loaded automatically as long as it is present within /usr/lib/xorg/modules. The list of loaded modules can be checked with grep LoadModule /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

To enable double buffering, add the double_buffer option to conky.conf: